I have been through a hellish time trying to translate the following sentences into Mandarin. Here’s hoping some kind soul here can help…
When we make yes/no questions from statements we move the first auxiliary verb to the front of the sentence. For this I have “Deng women yao ba cong yige cun2xu3shou1ming2 gaiwei duibudui/shi bu shi de yiwenju women ba zhudongci feng zai juzi qianmian”.
The next sentence is more problematic…
When we create - wh - questions from a yes/no questions we leave the auxiliary in front of the subject and place the - wh - word in front of the auxiliary. For this I have “Deng women yao ba cong duibudui/shibushi yiwenju gaiwei yige xun4xi2yi2wen4ju4 women liu zhudongci zai zhuci qianmian lan hou ba yiwen ci zai zhu dong ci qianmian”.
What bugs me about this is that yiwen ci seems to translate “literaly” to “question word” but there are lots of words that could be considered to be question words: be, do, have, can, could, should, will…
Also zhu4 dong4 ci2 seems to work pretty well for “be” as an auxiliary but less well for “do” and “have” as auxiliaries.
And finally I have no idea how to refer to the modal auxiliaries can, could should etc…
Basically what I would like is an accurate, if somewhat convoluted, way to refer specifically to the auxiliaries (be, do, have) modal auxiliaries (can, could, should…) and the - wh words - (who, what, where, when, why, how, which).
Thanks.